9 ms·

The Lonely Future of Buying Stuff

88 points by mcone 9y ago

Tijdreiziger 9y ago
Why are the shoes manufactured in China if no humans are necessary to do so? The primary reason to do manufacturing in low-wage countries now seems to be just that: low wages. Take out the need to pay wages and it makes a lot of sense to manufacture locally to save on shipping costs (and maybe even do things like manufacturing to order instead of keeping stock).
- quantumleap22 9y ago
  Environmental arbitrage.
  - arcseco 9y ago
    I work for a Canadian company that manufactures lighting components near Guangdong. Chrome plating is almost impossible to do in North America at a cost competitive price point. Just an anecdote about the conditions there; The supplier we use chome plates parts using a hexavalent chromium plating technique as opposed to a trivalent technique, irrespective of the environmental hazards that come along with it (As far as I know it's produces carcinogenic by products). I didn't see one worker with a respirator on or disposable gloves during my visits, health and safety seems to be an after thought. One of the holding tanks that for the byproduct plating solution was leaking from a fitting into the soil below, the surrounding areas are mostly farm lands (not sure what is in the solution that was leaking, but I would assume you wouldn't want it taken up by food crop). For us it's definitely an environmental sidestep. Really the only way for the west to become cost competitive for low end industrial manufacturing is going to be through a softening of environmental regulations or China's will have to close the gap with improved regulations.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      Or we could apply our domestic regulations to the entire supply chain. If you sell it here you have to follow the rules, all the way down. Of course then things would be expensive...
      - dukeflukem 9y ago
        Expensive things may not be a bad thing
    - katastic 9y ago
      There are various treatments (like Chrome plating) vendors one of my metalworking clients use--all available in the USA. They compete by being extremely efficient with their use of labor hours and cutting waste. Just-in-time everything. I'd be careful to extrapolate your direct experience to indicate trends.
      - nugi 9y ago
        I speak from experince in chroming. In the USA, hex chrome is insanely expensive, if even still possible under EPA. You may be thinking of tri chrome, which is what you can get here. Everyone outsources now due to this. Hoenstly, the chemicals are horrendus and chrome's days are numbered in any capacity thanks to new mirror finish water based paint. Even china will soon ban hex chrome process, by proxy if not explicitly.
        mulmen 9y ago
        I'm not a chemist, how will water based paint displace (heh) chrome? I understand the environmental and possibly cost benefits but if it is water based how will it work for exposed surfaces? Will it be used in heavy equipment on hydraulic actuators? I see the benefit of water based paint inside the cylinder where it meets the oil but what about the exposed area?
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Shorter supply lines to components and materials probably matters more than shorter supply lines to consumers. Plus, logistically speaking, China has a huge domestic market and a lot of manufacturing should probably be located there to minimize overall shipping costs.
- optikaluzion 9y ago
  This would probably be true if China didn't subsidize delivery of packages to the US. In many cases it is cheaper to send a package from China to the US than send the same thing within the US.
  - blackguardx 9y ago
    The USPS actually subsidizes the shipping of packages from China to the US. It is due to a treaty that was signed before China was an indistrialized nation.
    - mehrdadn 9y ago
      This blew my mind. Thank you for posting this!
- syshum 9y ago
  1. Environmental Regulations 2. Currency Exchange Rate (i.e State Manipulation) 3. Raw Supply Chain Location 4. Government Subsidies 5. Large Domestic Market Plenty of reasons why the shoes may continue to be made in China or in the Region. Companies move for a number of reasons, Raw Wages are often not as high on the list as people believe, at least not these days. Government Regulations, Taxation, and other non-wage factors are much higher
- daurnimator 9y ago
  I imagine another large factor is economies of scale. e.g. if a machine that makes 1000 widgets an hour is only 10 times the price of one that makes 10 widgets an hour, then you'll get centralisation. The other factor I imagine is proximity/availability of raw resources, and refineries of raw resources: if you're not shipping those shoes across the world, you still have to transport the plastic, leather, rubber etc to make them.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    But now you're assuming the labor was selected due to proximity to the raw resources when conventional wisdom says the labor was selected purely on cost.
    - daurnimator 9y ago
      I imagine the flow is: - Location selected based on cost of labor. - Major port is developed to deal with large amounts of goods - A few more factories/industries start in same area due to port accessibility - Refineries are built to be close to location of usage (now they import raw materials instead of refined materials) - More factories are built due to easy availability of resources + accessible port for export - Labor gets more expensive, but economies of scale of factories + refineries means it is cheaper to stay in place then to move elsewhere - Automation slowly displaces labour. End result being that economies of scale in manufacturing and refining make it cheaper to centralise manufacture and pay for shipping the end product than to decentralise and pay for small factories/refineries everywhere + shipping of raw resources.
      - mulmen 9y ago
        I think you are right about this. As a thought experiment if there was a magical 3d printer that could take any number of raw materials as inputs and combine them in any way would it become more efficient to ship a mix of raw materials to each end consumer? Say I consume x amount of rubber, y amount of cotton, z amount of plastic, etc in my consumer goods in a day, week, month whatever. Could it be more efficient to get the rubber and cotton to my door and run them through the printer than it would to build the shoes, basketballs and t-shirts somewhere else and ship them?
- taway20171214 9y ago
  how about: in the year 2036, the chinese are just better at making shoes than anyone else, because they've been doing it for 60 years? why is this so difficult for you to imagine? i mean, i'm pretty sure i know why, but ask yourself.
  - ribosometronome 9y ago
    I don't think they're trying to be racist against robots but wondering why Chongqing Future Robot Co Inc wouldn't put a shoebot in Phoenix to reduce the amount of shipping the shoe requires.
  - BurningFrog 9y ago
    The point of the article is that humans aren't making shoes anymore. So who has the best human expertise is irrelevant. The fully automated shoemaking machine could be placed anywhere the raw materials could be shipped.
    - taway20171214 9y ago
      > So who has the best human expertise is irrelevant. i agree, there's no way on earth any chinese firm could have the best shoe-making robot plant in 20 years. we all know chinese people aren't smart enough for that.
      - dang 9y ago
        Nationalistic flamewars have no place on HN, regardless of which nations are at issue. We've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  Why is a lot of software written in Silicon Valley? There are lots of good reasons why it shouldn't be (labor costs, etc), and nothing is as location-independent as software, yet networking effects mean that Silicon Valley remains the hub for software. China is similarly dominant for manufacturing. It's no longer about cost, it's about the concentration of expertise and cross-fertilization that results. Because of automation nobody will ever have the cost advantage that gave China its current dominance so China will remain the hub for the foreseeable future.
  - cepth 9y ago
    This really depends on what kind of goods you’re trying to manufacture. Speaking from firsthand experience, if you want to have anything with a circuit in it prototyped, picking a Shenzhen area factory to work with has many advantages. You can have new circuit boards printed and tested within a day. This kind of ecosystem may be hard to replicate elsewhere. On the other hand, for many other physical products proximity to the end customer is becoming the primary concern. Consider that as real wages in China are increasing, you’re looking at a 20-30% wage increase over the last 4-5 years in China. This means that any cost advantage over other countries is rapidly closing. Chinese raw materials and electricity are no cheaper than in the rest of the world. Due to new factors like increasingly stringent environmental regulations, many of these other inputs are increasing in cost. (http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2058175/chinese-manufacturing-hollowing-out http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2058175/chine...) If I want to have a plastics part mass produced, there are a number of regions in the US where there is near-parity with China when you factor in shipping costs, insurance, tariffs, the costs of delays and defects etc. For industries like textiles, there’s already been significant flight to India and Southeast Asia.
    - dx034 9y ago
      Isn't Adidas building automated factories in the US and Germany to produce close to designers and customers?
      - majewsky 9y ago
- lowbloodsugar 9y ago
  Because China is now the world leader in manufacturing technology.
- Feniks 9y ago
  No there are other considerations as well. Infrastructure, price of electricity, political stability, availability of cheap land.
- libertymcateer 9y ago
  First, humans are still necessary - to build the factories, to operate them, to act as security guards - and the cost of those humans is still lower. Second - all the other costs in low wage countries are also a lot lower. Combine that with how absurdly cheap international shipping is and there is no reason to relocate the manufacture of low-margin goods to the US until you are really starting to talk about the costs of automation being so efficient the extra pennies on shipping will make a difference in earnings. Given the expense of maintaining real assets in the U.S., i.e., buildings (utilities, maintenance, insurance, taxes, building), this is likely to be a while.
  - nawitus 9y ago
    "First, humans are still necessary - to build the factories, to operate them, to act as security guards - and the cost of those humans is still lower." A lot of this work will be automated in the coming decades to the point where the effect of wage costs is marginal. In addition, the salaries in developing countries will continue to increase, eventually catching up Western nations. At that point the main factors are probably tax/import policies, price of enercy etc.
- wmeredith 9y ago
  I also thought this was odd. US is the world's leader in manufacturing by GDP, but it's mostly automated compared to China.
- amigoingtodie 9y ago
  I heard low-wage factory jobs are leaving China and going to Africa.
analog31 9y ago
Creating, selling, transporting and buying consumer goods such as casual footwear now requires just one significant human—the consumer—plus an individual here and there to oversee assembly and repair robots. Many of the basics we buy are now constructed, bought, and shipped with no one besides the customer ever laying eyes on them. Just to complete the story, there is no consumer because nobody has a job, so there's no reason to create consumer goods in the first place.
- Tijdreiziger 9y ago
  That, or we have a universal basic income.
  - deckard1 9y ago
    Which all comes from taxing... Jeff Bezos? This all feels like we're sleepwalking into a nightmarish hell far beyond A Brave New World or 1984. Amazon, drones, mass surveillance, erosion of privacy. The day will come when we no longer can opt out.
    - 659087 9y ago
      > The day will come when we no longer can opt out. That day already came a long time ago. Even those of us who do everything we can to avoid the surveillance end up being sold out (often inadvertently) by those we know when they share information about us or have their contact lists harvested. That's without even getting into the data Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc collect from public records, credit card companies, etc.
      - paulie_a 9y ago
        Or Equifax, unless you want to live like Ted kazinksi there is no opt out there
    - stinkytaco 9y ago
      Or perhaps a utopia like Star Trek where material needs are accounted for and people are free to pursue what they want instead of what they need.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
matte_black 9y ago
This is the dream, factories that just print out whatever you want and send it to you. This is what 3D printing was supposed to be.
syshum 9y ago
>> The Lonely Future of Buying Stuff Where the Author says Lonely, I say Wonderful.... The less interaction I have with people to get the things I need/want the better. The day I can have all my food, groceries, and Computer parts delivered by Drone after ordering them on my phone is a day I will be happy.
- hycaria 9y ago
  There's something so enjoyable to me in going to the farmer's market and buying nice fresh products from the same friendly grocers I see every week. Maybe this is not available in the US, I don't know, but I always feel sad when I read such posts, as this feels so much like missing out on little human pleasures.
  - gdulli 9y ago
    I'd guess the desire not to interact with people, whether through this, or telecommuting, is disproportionately represented here (HN). But not at all a norm in the US. People here shop online because it's the path of least resistance, not because of a specific avoidance of participating in the world. I prefer shopping offline, to have more excuses to get out, not fewer. (Within reason of course, some stores/experiences really are worth avoiding.)
  - syshum 9y ago
    >>> little human pleasures. Interactions with humans just generally leaves me frustrated and annoyed I have no desire to talk with, or interact with someone while buying my apples or onions. In fact I shop at larger big box stores specifically because the employees are in different and do not attempt to engage with me. I want to get what I need and get out in the most efficient manner possible, small talk and inane banter waste time.
- mac01021 9y ago
  Aside from the associated cost savings, how is that any better than having the delivery guy drop the computer parts at your doorstep after ordering them on your phone?
gumby 9y ago
Why “lonely?” This sounds lovely to me. The main cost of most goods is the labor, and by eliminating that you drive the marginal cost way down (and as another poster observes, when the cost of labor is eliminated, why ship finished goods long distances?) And this will leave more time for people to spend with each other instead of in drudgery,
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  > And this will leave more time for people to spend with each other instead of in drudgery, This assumes that those increased profits from the increased productivity would end up in the hands of the lower-class laborers. What makes you think this would happen?
  - dabuess 9y ago
    The fact that it has happened over and over, almost without fail, in the entire history of human economic activity?
    - pjc50 9y ago
      .. up until the 1970s, when the wages-productivity link was broken. http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/what-happened-to-the-wage-and-productivity-link/ http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/what-happened-to-the-wage-a...
      - grandmczeb 9y ago
        Using just wages is misleading since benefits (like healthcare) make up a much larger portion of total compensation than they used to. If you adjust for this, you'd find that that total compensation has roughly kept pace with productivity. http://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/w13953.html http://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/w13953.html
        pjc50 9y ago
        Similar phenomena are visible in other developed countries, perhaps with different dates; this page gives a graph for the UK, where healthcare is paid from general taxation and has not suffered the same cost explosion: http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2013/05/the-progress-of-exploitation/ http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2013/05/the-progress-of-exploit... In that case the decoupling seems to have happened around 1990. The healthcare cost explosion in the US seems to be a whole other phenomenon which it's hard to get a handle on.
perilunar 9y ago
"The sneakers' trip from a southern Chinese footwear factory begins on July 5, 2036, and ends on Caitlin’s doorstep 18 weeks later" 18 weeks? Stuff that. The sneakers will be printed on demand at a local fab and delivered by drone within the hour.
- pasquinelli 9y ago
  or maybe caitlin will just print out her own shoes.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Seriously, this piece assumes everything will be exactly like it is now except everything that can be automated will be automated. It does however have some really pretty vaporwave illustrations so I guess there's that in its favor. I'd listen to an album that had most of those drawings as the cover art.
pascalxus 9y ago
Doesn't seem any more lonely than now, for the customer, anyways. Perhaps, it's lonely for the shoes being printed out?
dguo 9y ago
"Creating, selling, transporting and buying consumer goods such as casual footwear now requires just one significant human—the consumer—plus an individual here and there to oversee assembly and repair robots." I've said (half-jokingly) to my friends that in the future, recommendation systems will know so much about us and be so accurate that we won't even need to make many purchasing decisions anymore. They will make the decisions that we would have made anyway.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Why do i keep finding myself thinking of Accelerando?
crdoconnor 9y ago
This "futurist prediction" assumes that there will be no more innovation in footwear other than supply chain optimization and no desire for craftsmanship. Moreover, the kinds of "self driving vehicle" software it is predicting are kind of assuming a new kind of software that doesn't have bugs (what happens on your unmanned container ship when something goes awry?).
harlanji 9y ago
The main thing I'd want to know is which false incentives are in the system, eg. subsides, bribes. Those are things that can really be disrupted by the stroke of a pen. If this is the naturally optimal way to build things at scale, then I'm all for it. Also, rail and ship costs are marginally low, but it's hard to get past the visuals created by picturing the vehicles themselves (ie. it's a marketing problem).

88 points by mcone 9y ago

Why are the shoes manufactured in China if no humans are necessary to do so? The primary reason to do manufacturing in low-wage countries now seems to be just that: low wages. Take out the need to pay wages and it makes a lot of sense to manufacture locally to save on shipping costs (and maybe even do things like manufacturing to order instead of keeping stock).

quantumleap22 9y ago
Environmental arbitrage.
- arcseco 9y ago
  I work for a Canadian company that manufactures lighting components near Guangdong. Chrome plating is almost impossible to do in North America at a cost competitive price point. Just an anecdote about the conditions there; The supplier we use chome plates parts using a hexavalent chromium plating technique as opposed to a trivalent technique, irrespective of the environmental hazards that come along with it (As far as I know it's produces carcinogenic by products). I didn't see one worker with a respirator on or disposable gloves during my visits, health and safety seems to be an after thought. One of the holding tanks that for the byproduct plating solution was leaking from a fitting into the soil below, the surrounding areas are mostly farm lands (not sure what is in the solution that was leaking, but I would assume you wouldn't want it taken up by food crop). For us it's definitely an environmental sidestep. Really the only way for the west to become cost competitive for low end industrial manufacturing is going to be through a softening of environmental regulations or China's will have to close the gap with improved regulations.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    Or we could apply our domestic regulations to the entire supply chain. If you sell it here you have to follow the rules, all the way down. Of course then things would be expensive...
    - dukeflukem 9y ago
      Expensive things may not be a bad thing
  - katastic 9y ago
    There are various treatments (like Chrome plating) vendors one of my metalworking clients use--all available in the USA. They compete by being extremely efficient with their use of labor hours and cutting waste. Just-in-time everything. I'd be careful to extrapolate your direct experience to indicate trends.
    - nugi 9y ago
      I speak from experince in chroming. In the USA, hex chrome is insanely expensive, if even still possible under EPA. You may be thinking of tri chrome, which is what you can get here. Everyone outsources now due to this. Hoenstly, the chemicals are horrendus and chrome's days are numbered in any capacity thanks to new mirror finish water based paint. Even china will soon ban hex chrome process, by proxy if not explicitly.
      - mulmen 9y ago
        I'm not a chemist, how will water based paint displace (heh) chrome? I understand the environmental and possibly cost benefits but if it is water based how will it work for exposed surfaces? Will it be used in heavy equipment on hydraulic actuators? I see the benefit of water based paint inside the cylinder where it meets the oil but what about the exposed area?
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Shorter supply lines to components and materials probably matters more than shorter supply lines to consumers. Plus, logistically speaking, China has a huge domestic market and a lot of manufacturing should probably be located there to minimize overall shipping costs.
optikaluzion 9y ago
This would probably be true if China didn't subsidize delivery of packages to the US. In many cases it is cheaper to send a package from China to the US than send the same thing within the US.
- blackguardx 9y ago
  The USPS actually subsidizes the shipping of packages from China to the US. It is due to a treaty that was signed before China was an indistrialized nation.
  - mehrdadn 9y ago
    This blew my mind. Thank you for posting this!
syshum 9y ago
1. Environmental Regulations 2. Currency Exchange Rate (i.e State Manipulation) 3. Raw Supply Chain Location 4. Government Subsidies 5. Large Domestic Market Plenty of reasons why the shoes may continue to be made in China or in the Region. Companies move for a number of reasons, Raw Wages are often not as high on the list as people believe, at least not these days. Government Regulations, Taxation, and other non-wage factors are much higher
daurnimator 9y ago
I imagine another large factor is economies of scale. e.g. if a machine that makes 1000 widgets an hour is only 10 times the price of one that makes 10 widgets an hour, then you'll get centralisation. The other factor I imagine is proximity/availability of raw resources, and refineries of raw resources: if you're not shipping those shoes across the world, you still have to transport the plastic, leather, rubber etc to make them.
- mulmen 9y ago
  But now you're assuming the labor was selected due to proximity to the raw resources when conventional wisdom says the labor was selected purely on cost.
  - daurnimator 9y ago
    I imagine the flow is: - Location selected based on cost of labor. - Major port is developed to deal with large amounts of goods - A few more factories/industries start in same area due to port accessibility - Refineries are built to be close to location of usage (now they import raw materials instead of refined materials) - More factories are built due to easy availability of resources + accessible port for export - Labor gets more expensive, but economies of scale of factories + refineries means it is cheaper to stay in place then to move elsewhere - Automation slowly displaces labour. End result being that economies of scale in manufacturing and refining make it cheaper to centralise manufacture and pay for shipping the end product than to decentralise and pay for small factories/refineries everywhere + shipping of raw resources.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      I think you are right about this. As a thought experiment if there was a magical 3d printer that could take any number of raw materials as inputs and combine them in any way would it become more efficient to ship a mix of raw materials to each end consumer? Say I consume x amount of rubber, y amount of cotton, z amount of plastic, etc in my consumer goods in a day, week, month whatever. Could it be more efficient to get the rubber and cotton to my door and run them through the printer than it would to build the shoes, basketballs and t-shirts somewhere else and ship them?
taway20171214 9y ago
how about: in the year 2036, the chinese are just better at making shoes than anyone else, because they've been doing it for 60 years? why is this so difficult for you to imagine? i mean, i'm pretty sure i know why, but ask yourself.
- ribosometronome 9y ago
  I don't think they're trying to be racist against robots but wondering why Chongqing Future Robot Co Inc wouldn't put a shoebot in Phoenix to reduce the amount of shipping the shoe requires.
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  The point of the article is that humans aren't making shoes anymore. So who has the best human expertise is irrelevant. The fully automated shoemaking machine could be placed anywhere the raw materials could be shipped.
  - taway20171214 9y ago
    > So who has the best human expertise is irrelevant. i agree, there's no way on earth any chinese firm could have the best shoe-making robot plant in 20 years. we all know chinese people aren't smart enough for that.
    - dang 9y ago
      Nationalistic flamewars have no place on HN, regardless of which nations are at issue. We've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
bryanlarsen 9y ago
Why is a lot of software written in Silicon Valley? There are lots of good reasons why it shouldn't be (labor costs, etc), and nothing is as location-independent as software, yet networking effects mean that Silicon Valley remains the hub for software. China is similarly dominant for manufacturing. It's no longer about cost, it's about the concentration of expertise and cross-fertilization that results. Because of automation nobody will ever have the cost advantage that gave China its current dominance so China will remain the hub for the foreseeable future.
- cepth 9y ago
  This really depends on what kind of goods you’re trying to manufacture. Speaking from firsthand experience, if you want to have anything with a circuit in it prototyped, picking a Shenzhen area factory to work with has many advantages. You can have new circuit boards printed and tested within a day. This kind of ecosystem may be hard to replicate elsewhere. On the other hand, for many other physical products proximity to the end customer is becoming the primary concern. Consider that as real wages in China are increasing, you’re looking at a 20-30% wage increase over the last 4-5 years in China. This means that any cost advantage over other countries is rapidly closing. Chinese raw materials and electricity are no cheaper than in the rest of the world. Due to new factors like increasingly stringent environmental regulations, many of these other inputs are increasing in cost. (http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2058175/chinese-manufacturing-hollowing-out http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2058175/chine...) If I want to have a plastics part mass produced, there are a number of regions in the US where there is near-parity with China when you factor in shipping costs, insurance, tariffs, the costs of delays and defects etc. For industries like textiles, there’s already been significant flight to India and Southeast Asia.
  - dx034 9y ago
    Isn't Adidas building automated factories in the US and Germany to produce close to designers and customers?
    - majewsky 9y ago
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
Because China is now the world leader in manufacturing technology.
Feniks 9y ago
No there are other considerations as well. Infrastructure, price of electricity, political stability, availability of cheap land.
libertymcateer 9y ago
First, humans are still necessary - to build the factories, to operate them, to act as security guards - and the cost of those humans is still lower. Second - all the other costs in low wage countries are also a lot lower. Combine that with how absurdly cheap international shipping is and there is no reason to relocate the manufacture of low-margin goods to the US until you are really starting to talk about the costs of automation being so efficient the extra pennies on shipping will make a difference in earnings. Given the expense of maintaining real assets in the U.S., i.e., buildings (utilities, maintenance, insurance, taxes, building), this is likely to be a while.
- nawitus 9y ago
  "First, humans are still necessary - to build the factories, to operate them, to act as security guards - and the cost of those humans is still lower." A lot of this work will be automated in the coming decades to the point where the effect of wage costs is marginal. In addition, the salaries in developing countries will continue to increase, eventually catching up Western nations. At that point the main factors are probably tax/import policies, price of enercy etc.
wmeredith 9y ago
I also thought this was odd. US is the world's leader in manufacturing by GDP, but it's mostly automated compared to China.
amigoingtodie 9y ago
I heard low-wage factory jobs are leaving China and going to Africa.

analog31 9y ago

Creating, selling, transporting and buying consumer goods such as casual footwear now requires just one significant human—the consumer—plus an individual here and there to oversee assembly and repair robots. Many of the basics we buy are now constructed, bought, and shipped with no one besides the customer ever laying eyes on them. Just to complete the story, there is no consumer because nobody has a job, so there's no reason to create consumer goods in the first place.

Tijdreiziger 9y ago
That, or we have a universal basic income.
- deckard1 9y ago
  Which all comes from taxing... Jeff Bezos? This all feels like we're sleepwalking into a nightmarish hell far beyond A Brave New World or 1984. Amazon, drones, mass surveillance, erosion of privacy. The day will come when we no longer can opt out.
  - 659087 9y ago
    > The day will come when we no longer can opt out. That day already came a long time ago. Even those of us who do everything we can to avoid the surveillance end up being sold out (often inadvertently) by those we know when they share information about us or have their contact lists harvested. That's without even getting into the data Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc collect from public records, credit card companies, etc.
    - paulie_a 9y ago
      Or Equifax, unless you want to live like Ted kazinksi there is no opt out there
  - stinkytaco 9y ago
    Or perhaps a utopia like Star Trek where material needs are accounted for and people are free to pursue what they want instead of what they need.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

matte_black 9y ago

This is the dream, factories that just print out whatever you want and send it to you. This is what 3D printing was supposed to be.

syshum 9y ago

>> The Lonely Future of Buying Stuff Where the Author says Lonely, I say Wonderful.... The less interaction I have with people to get the things I need/want the better. The day I can have all my food, groceries, and Computer parts delivered by Drone after ordering them on my phone is a day I will be happy.

hycaria 9y ago
There's something so enjoyable to me in going to the farmer's market and buying nice fresh products from the same friendly grocers I see every week. Maybe this is not available in the US, I don't know, but I always feel sad when I read such posts, as this feels so much like missing out on little human pleasures.
- gdulli 9y ago
  I'd guess the desire not to interact with people, whether through this, or telecommuting, is disproportionately represented here (HN). But not at all a norm in the US. People here shop online because it's the path of least resistance, not because of a specific avoidance of participating in the world. I prefer shopping offline, to have more excuses to get out, not fewer. (Within reason of course, some stores/experiences really are worth avoiding.)
- syshum 9y ago
  >>> little human pleasures. Interactions with humans just generally leaves me frustrated and annoyed I have no desire to talk with, or interact with someone while buying my apples or onions. In fact I shop at larger big box stores specifically because the employees are in different and do not attempt to engage with me. I want to get what I need and get out in the most efficient manner possible, small talk and inane banter waste time.
mac01021 9y ago
Aside from the associated cost savings, how is that any better than having the delivery guy drop the computer parts at your doorstep after ordering them on your phone?

gumby 9y ago

Why “lonely?” This sounds lovely to me. The main cost of most goods is the labor, and by eliminating that you drive the marginal cost way down (and as another poster observes, when the cost of labor is eliminated, why ship finished goods long distances?) And this will leave more time for people to spend with each other instead of in drudgery,

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> And this will leave more time for people to spend with each other instead of in drudgery, This assumes that those increased profits from the increased productivity would end up in the hands of the lower-class laborers. What makes you think this would happen?
- dabuess 9y ago
  The fact that it has happened over and over, almost without fail, in the entire history of human economic activity?
  - pjc50 9y ago
    .. up until the 1970s, when the wages-productivity link was broken. http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/what-happened-to-the-wage-and-productivity-link/ http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/what-happened-to-the-wage-a...
    - grandmczeb 9y ago
      Using just wages is misleading since benefits (like healthcare) make up a much larger portion of total compensation than they used to. If you adjust for this, you'd find that that total compensation has roughly kept pace with productivity. http://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/w13953.html http://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/w13953.html
      - pjc50 9y ago
        Similar phenomena are visible in other developed countries, perhaps with different dates; this page gives a graph for the UK, where healthcare is paid from general taxation and has not suffered the same cost explosion: http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2013/05/the-progress-of-exploitation/ http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2013/05/the-progress-of-exploit... In that case the decoupling seems to have happened around 1990. The healthcare cost explosion in the US seems to be a whole other phenomenon which it's hard to get a handle on.

perilunar 9y ago

"The sneakers' trip from a southern Chinese footwear factory begins on July 5, 2036, and ends on Caitlin’s doorstep 18 weeks later" 18 weeks? Stuff that. The sneakers will be printed on demand at a local fab and delivered by drone within the hour.

pasquinelli 9y ago
or maybe caitlin will just print out her own shoes.
egypturnash 9y ago
Seriously, this piece assumes everything will be exactly like it is now except everything that can be automated will be automated. It does however have some really pretty vaporwave illustrations so I guess there's that in its favor. I'd listen to an album that had most of those drawings as the cover art.

pascalxus 9y ago

Doesn't seem any more lonely than now, for the customer, anyways. Perhaps, it's lonely for the shoes being printed out?

dguo 9y ago

"Creating, selling, transporting and buying consumer goods such as casual footwear now requires just one significant human—the consumer—plus an individual here and there to oversee assembly and repair robots." I've said (half-jokingly) to my friends that in the future, recommendation systems will know so much about us and be so accurate that we won't even need to make many purchasing decisions anymore. They will make the decisions that we would have made anyway.

digi_owl 9y ago
Why do i keep finding myself thinking of Accelerando?

crdoconnor 9y ago

This "futurist prediction" assumes that there will be no more innovation in footwear other than supply chain optimization and no desire for craftsmanship. Moreover, the kinds of "self driving vehicle" software it is predicting are kind of assuming a new kind of software that doesn't have bugs (what happens on your unmanned container ship when something goes awry?).

harlanji 9y ago

The main thing I'd want to know is which false incentives are in the system, eg. subsides, bribes. Those are things that can really be disrupted by the stroke of a pen. If this is the naturally optimal way to build things at scale, then I'm all for it. Also, rail and ship costs are marginally low, but it's hard to get past the visuals created by picturing the vehicles themselves (ie. it's a marketing problem).